Veg Patch Dinners James Martin: Home Comforts

If there's one thing I look forward to at the end of a busy day,

it's the thought of getting back to my kitchen at home.

For me, nothing beats cooking some simple, heart-warming food.

Oh, oh, oh! It is so good.

The kind of no nonsense grub that brings people together.

Cheers, everyone.

The dishes I turn to when I want to put a big smile on everyone's face.

These are my home comforts.

I grew up on a farm in Yorkshire,

and now I'm lucky enough to call rural Hampshire my home.

For me, one of the best things about living here

is that I've got space to keep in touch with my farming roots.

The first thing I did when I moved here was to plant my own veg

patch and build my own greenhouse.

I did it as a tribute to my old grandad,

who was an amazing gardener, and from the age of three, he taught me

the value of freshly grown fruit and veg.

So today, we'll be cooking up ideas for your home-grown produce.

Mmm, look at that!

We discover that the Victorians

had some funny ideas about fruit and veg.

Lettuce was said to dampen lust,

other vegetables were supposed to make you somewhat frisky.

The seeds of a very clever idea are sown in London.

If you're ingenious enough,

then you can grow vegetables in the centre of the city.

And my own garden is the inspiration for some surprising dishes.

From field to fork, they call it,

but in under ten minutes, you've got a meal.

It doesn't get any better.

When I get home after a busy day, I love to get out in the garden

and work on my veg patch.

Now I was told a good trick - before you pull the carrots

out of the ground, is to soak it really well with water.

If not, the tops kind of snap off.

Growing so much fresh produce right on my doorstep is a fantastic

incentive to come up with new and interesting ways of using it.

One of my tastiest recipes...

What I love about this recipe,

it uses everything that grows in my garden, or almost everything.

Apart from mussels and a bit of stock, of course.

But I love growing fresh herbs.

There's nothing better than fresh herbs straight out of the garden.

And they're so inexpensive when you grow them yourself.

Now the first thing I'm going to get on is the veg,

because this is so quick to cook.

Chop up a few shallots.

The key to success with this soup

is using a good selection of veg as a base.

Along with shallots, I'm throwing in some courgettes, fennel,

celery, radishes and carrots.

Really, you can use whatever selection of veg you want.

Nothing beats carrots, of course, from your garden.

And don't peel them.

If you peel these things, you just take half the flavour off.

All you want to do with this, you just chop them the same size

as the rest of the veg.

When your veg are prepped, it's just a matter of sweating them

with a little bit of butter over a low heat for five minutes or

so, until they're just softened.

Now, at the same time, I'm going to make my sauce.

This is classed as a salsa verde, which is

a selection of different types of herbs.

It's a classic Italian green sauce that can be used,

not just as a flavouring into soups,

but it can also be used as a lovely little garnish to go with

steaks on the barbecue, anything like that, or chicken.

Just a delicious, simple little sauce.

As well as mint and dill, you'll need tarragon,

flat-leaf parsley, watercress and basil for the salsa verde.

Blitz the whole lot in a food processor

until they are roughly chopped, before adding a large shallot.

Then the flavour depends on where you come from, I suppose.

Because different areas certainly have their own secret recipe.

But the ones that I've always had have always got anchovies,

and this is what sets it apart, I suppose, from a pesto.

Add six of them, along with two tablespoons of capers,

the juice of half a lemon and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard.

You'll need a good glug of olive oil and seasoning,

before blending it again.

You almost don't want it too smooth.

Traditionally, this would be done with a pestle and mortar,

and you'd grind it all down.

And you end up with this delicious green sauce.

It's a good way to use up a lot of herbs that are in the garden.

If you've got any overgrowing, it's a great way to use them all up.

By the time your salsa verde is prepped,

the veg for your soup should have softened nicely.

So then it's time to add your mussels.

Now, it's important to pick through the mussels.

There's a little beard on the mussels - that little fellow there.

That's what holds it to the rope or the rocks.

Pull that out.

And make sure you go through them all.

These are quite small mussels,

so these won't take very long to cook at all. Throw them in.

Use 500 grams of mussels, followed by 150 mls of white wine

and 750 mls of stock.

Cover and simmer for two to three minutes

until all the mussel shells have opened.

Now, it may be only a short cooking time,

but I can't wait to taste this.

So just to finish this off, cos the mussels are now cooked.

They're lovely and open. You can tell that

cos you can see the little fellas opening up.

These are perfect.

Give it a quick season.

And then what I do is just turn off the heat, really.

Because the important bit is this.

And if you just take a spoonful of this, or a couple of spoonfuls,

you almost stir this in as it comes to the table.

So, you just pop it in right at the last minute

so it retains all that lovely colour

but flavour.

It's not until you taste it, you really appreciate how good it is.

It's just great, this.

This soup really is something special.

Not only is it packed with incredible flavours from all

those veg, it's also got a herby punch from the amazing salsa verde.

Growing the kind of herbs that go into salsa verde couldn't be easier.

Many of them thrive at home in pots and window boxes.

When it comes to large scale food production,

you may think you need acres of land.

But you'd be wrong.

Small-scale growers known as patchwork farmers are banding

together to produce organic salad, right in the heart of London.

They're dotted across the borough of Hackney,

on any green plot they can find.

They grow over a tonne of award-winning produce every year,

and they call it the Hackney Salad.

One of the urban farmers is Ximena Ransom.

So here we are. This is my office.

It's actually certified by the Soil Association as an organic

growing site, right here in the heart of London.

The scheme trains volunteers on how to grow salad, before providing

them with a plot of land and leaving them to cultivate their own produce.

People might think that there isn't much land that can be

used for growing food, but this proves that

if you're ingenious enough and you manage to find pockets of land,

then you can grow vegetables in the centre of the city.

The places that we grow, as patchwork farmers,

can range from church gardens

to spaces like this, which is in a community garden.

The patchwork farmers pool their produce once a week.

And having salad from so many different growers has some

real advantages.

I think the beauty of what we do as patchwork farmers,

is, collectively, we have a lot of leaves in our salad

and there's a lot more variety in taste.

We've got over 70 different types of leaves,

over all our patchwork sites.

Every week, the salad bags have at least 20 to 30 different leaves,

creating flavours you'll never get in a supermarket.

This variety is called Regina de Ghiacci.

I think it's a really beautiful open-leaf lettuce.

The one next to it, which looks pretty different,

is called Australian Yellowleaf.

We have a lot of herbs, different types of cabbage leaves

and things you wouldn't expect to go into a salad.

This is mizuna, it's an oriental green.

It's actually gone to flower. And you might not think that they'd

be edible, but they are, and they're absolutely delicious.

They're quite sweet and, to me, they taste of honey.

Most of Ximena's produce is sold through a veg box scheme.

Her customers simply collect their salad from any

one of 13 pick-up points around Hackney.

And because it is grown so locally,

the salad has zero food miles and zero carbon footprint.

Transport is an electric milk float called Maisy,

so it's just as well she doesn't have far to go.

She goes at 20mph max, that's downhill,

so it can be frustrating for other drivers,

but usually they just laugh at me.

We deliver about 400 bags a week.

All in all, there's about 800 members of the box scheme.

As well as going into veg boxes,

the salad is also sold in local cafes, restaurants and shops.

What I love about doing this in Hackney is that you're right

in the centre of things and you're...where you're growing,

where you're selling, where you're producing is where people live.

In that sense, you're not hidden away on a farm somewhere.

-All right, here's your salad.

-Ooh, lovely salad.

One of her regular customers, Ben, runs a local bakery,

and he wants his sandwich fillings to be just as fresh as his bread.

It's grown here in Hackney, it's a stone's throw away

from the bakery, you can just taste the freshness.

It's literally like having a vegetable patch in our back garden.

And our customers are really

delighted that we're kind of putting it out there.

When Ximena's not delivering round London's bustling streets,

she escapes to the tranquillity of her canal boat

for a much more chilled pace of life.

Here, she turns any leaves too big to go into the salads

into delicious pestos, chutneys and cakes

that she sells at Stoke Newington Farmers' Market every fortnight.

Any leftover can be eaten for supper.

At the moment where we've got lots and lots of sorrel in the garden,

so I'm going to make a really delicious sorrel pesto.

Sorrel has a subtle lemony flavour that gives a zing to any sauce.

Ximena blends chopped leaves with olive oil before adding

toasted pumpkin and sesame seeds.

And finally some garlic,

fresh Parmesan and a pinch of salt.

For me, that's just the right texture, it's really chunky

and there's just enough garlic to give it a kick.

Oh, that's so good.

Job done and Ximena has made just enough to enjoy

a bowl of pasta with home-made sorrel pesto.

I can't imagine doing anything else.

It's extremely rewarding.

I would never give up this job.

It's actually my ideal job and what I dreamt about doing.

So to do...be able to do this in the middle of London is incredible.

I'm always keen on picking up some gardening tips.

So I've invited Ximena over to my house for a tasty lunch

that's packed with her Hackney grown sorrel.

Now, I love the veg plot, but tell me about the milk float.

How cool is that?

It's pretty cool, yeah.

We drive it around Hackney delivering the veg bags

and we get some funny looks, cos it's got horns and udders.

-Nice.

-It's actually disguised as a cow.

Where does it come from, then?

The original one was inherited from Greenpeace.

What on earth did they want a milk float for?

I think they delivered milk in it.

Right, as you do, yeah, yeah, OK.

But it's a pimped out milk float, that's what I like about it.

Yeah, pimped up milk float, exactly.

Maybe one to add to your collection?

-I probably doubt it, to be honest, but you know, maybe...

-No?

-Well...

I've always wanted a car with horns, but maybe not with udders.

To really appreciate the unique flavour of sorrel, I think

it's best to cook it in a simple dish.

So I'm showing Ximena my recipe for salmon and sorrel with vermouth.

Now, to grow this sort of stuff, it's pretty straightforward,

-isn't it?

-It is actually.

It's a perennial, so it keeps coming back. You don't have to

replant it season after season, which you do with quite a lot of

other leaves. And it grows like mad, like we have to keep up with it.

You're talking about seasons.

Are you limited to what you can grow in the area? Because

you can't have anything that's slow-growing, can you?

Or are you looking at things that are quite quick to grow?

We only grow salad leaves.

We don't grow things like carrots and potatoes,

cos they just take up too much land for not enough yield.

You'd be surprised how much does grow, even over winter.

We don't have any polytunnels on our sites

and we still manage to grow quite a lot of salad, winter salad leaves.

So how do you get a site in the first place? I mean, how do you

go about that? Because space is at a bit of a premium in London anyway.

-It is.

-How do you go about finding somewhere?

-With difficulty.

-THEY LAUGH

-Got to be nice to the council, have you?

-Yeah. I mean, one

of our sites, we just basically asked the vicar

if he wanted his garden to be worked on and he was quite grateful

because he didn't have time to maintain it.

-Cos the idea, I have to say, is just fantastic.

-It's great.

You can utilise some of the spaces

often by the side of a railway line or anything like that that's...

-Yeah, absolutely.

-..normally never going to get used, really.

I'm going to grill thinly sliced salmon for this dish.

I start by greasing a baking tray with my favourite ingredient -

butter.

And it's a good tip that I learned - black pepper

and salt the tray first,

cos this seasons it, which means that

the slices of fish that we place on the top are going to look

really nice and not have any little black bits on it as well.

So just thinly slice.

And then each slice, you kind of lay on a buttered tray

nicely, like that.

Collectively, you're producing nearly a tonne of herbs and salad.

-Yes.

-Who else is doing that? How many sites have you got?

We've got 12 sites in all.

The whole project is called Patchwork Farm Project.

The idea is to train people to gain a skill in growing food

-and then give them a plot of land afterwards...

-Yeah.

..that they grow salad on.

And then they sell it back to the veg box scheme, which is

-all part...under the umbrella of Growing Communities.

-Right.

So it's skilling people up in gardening

and encouraging more people to do that.

How fantastic.

I start the sauce for the salmon

by adding a finely diced shallot to the pan.

Once it's softened, add the vermouth.

It's very important that you use this.

It doesn't just work with white wine, but it must be a little

dry vermouth and a combination of that and white wine.

I use 75 mls of both the vermouth and the white wine.

Then I bring the whole lot to the boil and reduce by half.

Now, tell me what you've got here, cos it's not just this

-sort of stuff that you grow.

-Yeah.

-All manner of different stuff.

All manner of different stuff. A lot of variety of leaves.

So we come together on a Tuesday, when we harvest,

and all the sites put our salad leaves into a big trough.

So you all arrive en masse in milk floats.

En masse. No, not all in milk floats.

I can just see that.

Clogging up the Borough of Hackney.

-Go on.

-No, no, we've got our cycles

-and trailers.

-Right.

-And we get our salads to base.

And we make sure that, across the sites,

-we all grow varied stuff so we don't all have the same thing.

-Right.

We've got our lovely salmon here.

There's no need to put any oil on this whatsoever.

You've got butter, salt and pepper.

Just as your liquid in there is starting to reduce,

you just pop it under the grill.

Now, that's only going to take about two minutes, which gives you

enough time to finish off this sauce, and use double cream.

Once I've added 150 mls of double cream, I then cook

it for about two to three minutes until the sauce has thickened.

That gives me time to prep the sorrel.

I just de-vein it first of all, just pull the leaves off,

but, I mean, this is great in salads and...

It's great, yeah. It's quite an unusual taste.

I think people sometimes are quite surprised by the citrus-y

-taste of it.

-It's one of these things that a lot of people

are put off. Maybe they've tried it once. It's that sourness in it.

-Yes.

-But you can...that can work in your favour particularly with

this, because of the cream and with the fattiness of the salmon.

But the most important thing is, I don't think...

If you are going to cook it, you don't overcook it.

Otherwise, it can go quite bitter.

Once they're de-veined, slice the leaves very thinly.

When the salmon is cooked, take it out and leave it to rest.

Then add your sorrel to the sauce.

Now this is crucial. If you're going to do this at home,

turn the heat off,

right at the last minute, these go in.

-It reduces down really quickly, doesn't it?

-Yeah.

-Like spinach.

-It's already going,

you can see the colour's just disappearing already.

And you just pop that on the plate.

The key to tasty food is simplicity.

You don't need 101 things to make a delicious meal.

By just adding a beautiful, creamy sauce with a zesty

hint of veg patch sorrel,

you can bring a humble piece of grilled salmon to a whole new level.

Tell me what you think of that because I think this is the classic

combination to go with sorrel.

Very French, very classic, but...

Mm.

The lemon flavour with the fish is really nice.

The lemon flavour works, but it must be dry vermouth as well.

Can't just make this with white wine.

Really simple as well. That's what I like.

It's a dish that I learned in my teens and I still do it at home.

It just... If you can get sorrel, that is the combination that

you need to do.

What I grow at home in my veg patch

is small potatoes compared to the rich harvests

that came from the Victorian kitchen gardens of our stately homes.

Food historian Dr Annie Gray is at Audley End House in Essex,

where she's exploring the surprising dishes those kitchen gardens

inspired.

The Victorians grew so many different types of vegetables,

and it was a really good period for breeding intensively.

They grew all sorts of things that we would know,

things like broccoli, which had just arrived from Italy, beetroot, turnip

swede, carrots in lots of different colours.

You name it, they grew it.

One of the oldest vegetables is the lettuce.

The Victorians did eat lettuces raw - just chopped up roughly with

a dressing on them - but they also used to cook with them.

One of the most popular dishes was stuffed lettuces,

which originally is a Georgian and French recipe.

Very sophisticated.

But today, I'm going to cook a late-Victorian version of it.

This is laitues farcies, or stuffed lettuces.

By today's standards, Victorians did strange things with lettuce.

But the theories behind their approach to food were even odder.

The Victorians used to cook quite a lot of their salads and vegetables.

It's partly a hangover from earlier eras,

where uncooked vegetables were widely mistrusted.

Although the lettuce for Victorians was said to dampen lust,

other vegetables were supposed to make you somewhat frisky.

There you go.

The first unusual step to this bizarre recipe was to parboil

the lettuces.

Then it was on to the stuffing.

In this recipe, breadcrumbs, suet, parsley, the rind of a lemon

and seasoning were added to the veal mince.

Veal was really popular for the Victorians

because it's a very versatile meat.

You can do almost anything with it and it takes flavour very well.

The next thing I need to do is to stuff these lettuces.

The secret is to make sure you've got enough leaves, that you can

enclose the whole thing afterwards, so I think that will do it.

Once the heart of the lettuce was pinched out,

the veal meat stuffing was added and the whole lot was tied up tightly.

It does show you the way in which Victorians

relied on their servants, but it also shows, you, I think,

the lengths to which they were prepared to go in order

to make sure that something looked absolutely beautiful.

The stuffed lettuces were put in a pan that has been lined with

fatty bacon, vegetables and herbs.

Then stock was added.

This is nice veal stock, so it will enhance the flavour

of the veal in the lettuce, and be a very nice, fine flavour.

It'll be in the oven for about 30 minutes,

just while everything cooks through.

Lettuce wasn't the only salad ingredient the Victorians

cooked with.

The Industrial Revolution gave birth to glasshouses,

heated by hot water pipes.

They were known as hothouses

and any country pile worth its salt invested in one.

This meant that exotic fruits could be grown,

and that seasonal salad veg was available all year round.

Cucumber was a hothouse favourite, and, just like lettuce,

the Victorians had some peculiar ways of preparing it.

Annie has made a 19th-century cucumber soup.

It's a superb recipe and one which really showcases

the best of cucumbers.

And the recipe calls for from eight to 20 cucumbers.

To make the soup, peeled

and deseeded cucumbers were simply cooked with veal stock until tender.

At that point,

in true Victorian fashion,

the whole lot is put through a sieve,

so that what you've got is this really beautiful puree.

But as you can see, this is not the thickest of soups.

What I've got here is two egg yolks. And the way Victorians would have

thickened their salad soup is pretty much the same as making custard.

So that's hot soup going into egg yolk.

Cucumbers are one of those vegetables that some people

got really obsessed with in the Victorian period,

to the point that it became a mark of pride

to have a straight cucumber.

And George Stephenson, who of course is famous for inventing

the Rocket, the steam engine, was also famous for having

his factory make glass cylinder cucumber straightening devices.

So this is just going to go in to thicken my soup.

I think that's about done.

With the stuffed lettuce out of the oven and the soup nicely thickened,

it's time to taste these delicacies from the Victorian vegetable garden.

They're looking pretty good.

They're really nice.

You've got sort of crisp still in the lettuce,

certainly in the stem,

and that meat is very herby, quite spicy, very rich as well.

You get something that just looks like a braised lettuce

and you cut it open and - hey presto, it's stuffed!

Absolutely brilliant.

Mm, it's superb.

Imagine being a Victorian. Imagine being in the depths of winter,

but knowing that your hothouse is still producing cucumbers.

And imagine tasting this.

It really is like a reminder of summer or perhaps

a hint of things to come.

Absolutely gorgeous.

Just like the Victorians, I enjoy coming up with different

ways of cooking ingredients from my veg patch.

One of my favourite recipes, inspired by my home-grown produce,

is guaranteed to perk up a barbecue.

It's cauliflower salad with barbecue chicken and honey tomatoes.

This is a recipe that epitomises everything that I've got

in the garden. And what I love about it so much...

I just love this area of the house.

We've got the lovely greenhouse behind us

with fresh tomatoes growing.

Fantastic selection of veg that really sort of inspire you to

want to cook them. And I thought with this one, we'd do

sort of like a little couscous, but a couscous using cauliflower.

Quite an unusual ingredient to serve raw,

but one that works really, really well with chicken.

For this recipe, I like to barbecue some chicken breasts.

But before cooking them,

it's better to toss them in a little bit of olive oil and seasoning.

The secret of this is not to add too much oil on to the food,

otherwise it just drips and creates flames on the barbecue.

I'm going to grab just a tiny bit of fresh thyme.

This is one of the benefits of having a garden, is you can

just throw in whatever you fancy, really, whatever you feel.

Thyme, rosemary, a bit of lavender even, which is

fantastic with this of course, or great with lamb chops.

Just stick this straight on the barbecue.

We just leave that for about three or four minutes before we turn

it over. Otherwise, it actually sticks.

Now, while that's cooking, I'm going to grab some tomatoes.

My uncle and my grandad were amazing veg growers,

particularly in the greenhouse.

You had a fantastic smell the minute you walked in.

There's nothing else like it. The smell of these

and the taste are just superb.

Throw the tomatoes on the barbecue, too.

To do this, I'll make a little tray from tinfoil, then put the halved

tomatoes in it, before drizzling them with olive oil and seasoning.

Then add a little sweetness.

Just a tiny bit of honey.

Now, you can use maple syrup,

which I'm going to use for the dressing for this,

but honey works really well. And of course, not forgetting a few herbs.

For this, I'm going to use a few sprigs of thyme with the tomatoes.

Then just chuck them onto the barbecue

for 12 to 15 minutes,

which gives me time to make the cauliflower salad.

And for this, you just stick it in a blender.

Chop it up into reasonable sort of small florets.

And this is an amazing salad that you can have with any meat or fish.

But the secret is not to blitz it for too long.

You just want to make sure that they're sort of small pieces. But if

you blitz it too much, it turns into a puree. So keep your eye on it.

When your cauliflower has been blitzed into the consistency of

small grains, tip it out into a bowl and get started on the dressing.

The dressing is quite unusual.

Due to the fact that it uses, instead of oil as a base,

maple syrup.

Now, I'm a massive fan of maple syrup.

I love it.

But you've got to get the good stuff.

This is one ingredient I don't skimp on.

250 mls goes into a pan, followed by a heaped teaspoon

of curry powder and six tablespoons of white wine vinegar.

And what you need to do is warm this up.

And warming it up will actually get all the flavours

out of the curry powder.

What the maple syrup will do, it will give it a lovely sweetness,

which goes really well with the chicken.

And all you need to do is just pour this...

..over the top of the cauliflower...

..and mix this together.

Add 75 grams of roughly chopped pistachio nuts

and the same amount of toasted flaked almonds.

And then the herbs.

I'm going to use a combination of two herbs

that I grow in the garden -

mint and coriander, which are so easy to grow, particularly mint.

And anybody will know, if they've got a garden,

will know to plant mint in containers. Otherwise,

it just goes everywhere. It's like my food hell- horseradish.

My mate planted that to wind me up.

Can't get rid of it. It's horrendous stuff.

I've got to move house to get rid of it.

Next into the salad, it's a generous amount of seasoning

and four chopped spring onions.

Spring onions, normal onions, I grow them by the masses.

I think gardening is like anything else -

it's all to do with practice.

There's one thing that I do watch. I watch these gardening shows,

and I really don't understand most of them.

All I want to know is where you get it from

and what muck do you grow it in.

Finish off the salad by piling on the barbecued chicken

and the tomatoes on the top.

Now, there's nothing better than fresh tomatoes from the garden.

It's definitely one of the best things that come out of my garden.

The flavour is just fantastic.

Like this, even on sort of toast with proper bacon

You just can't beat it.

It's amazing that simple ingredients like maple syrup, curry powder,

cauliflower and herbs can be rustled up into this fantastic salad.

But it's all those surprising flavours

and textures that make this a delicious veg patch dish.

The salad and the tomatoes is what this dish is all about - it's fresh.

Well, you don't get any fresher than that, do you, really?

It's just fantastic. Every mouthful just bursts with flavour.

From field to fork, they call it,

but in under ten minutes, you've got a meal.

Doesn't get any better.

Every veg patch in the country relies on one little

creature for its survival - the bee.

And like Ximena's London leaves, honeybees can thrive in cities, too.

In a quiet corner of Regents Park, Central London,

you'll find beekeeper Toby Mason.

Since 2004, he's produced a multi floral honey from the 40 or

so hives that he tends there.

I got into beekeeping many years ago when a friend of mine

showed me his hives and I thought it was just wonderful.

So I did a beekeeping course and then got my hives.

I like to collect the honey at night

because the bees tend to go down to where the queen is,

so when I'm stealing their honey from them, they don't get too upset.

Safety considerations aside, the honeycombs of liquid gold

that Toby's collecting are worth putting in a night shift for.

I think, very sadly, many people don't know what proper honey's like.

A lot of the honey that's sold is no more than thick sugar syrup and

has none of the excitement and the flavours and the joy of real honey.

In the morning, Toby extracts the honey from last night's collection.

So this is the box of honey which we collected last night

and is now bee free, which is the best way for removing the honey.

The flowers here are completely seasonal

and the honey changes its flavour throughout the seasons.

As we start off, it's often much more light and floral-y.

My favourite is the sort of around June time -

you get the lime trees and the brambles in flower and it

produces this lovely light honey that's almost citrus-y in flavour.

It's truly wonderful.

And then by the time you get to September, it gets really quite dark,

where you've got ivy coming through

and almost a more savoury taste.

Now I need to get the honey out of the frames.

It's a deceptively simple process.

To ensure the honey retains its unique character,

Toby removes the wax caps and places the combs into what is

the beekeeper's equivalent of a spin dryer.

I first started keeping bees for the beekeeping aspect,

but at the end of that year, when I took the honey off,

I was blown away by the flavours in it.

There was roses and elderflowers. And I suppose it was not surprising,

given the amazing rose garden that's here in Regents Park.

The honey's kept in its most natural state.

All we're doing is doing a very light filter to take out

small bits of wax that have come off the comb.

This means that the honey keeps its incredible flavours.

Commercially produced honey is heated for several reasons.

One, it flows much quicker, you can do this processing much quicker.

Those light flavours disappear very quickly once you heat it up.

And like all quality garden produce,

Toby doesn't have to travel far to find willing customers.

Which is lucky, as he delivers everything on his bike.

He supplies the likes of Fortnum and Mason,

as well delis around Regents Park.

I'm arriving here now at Melrose and Morgan, which is my oldest customer,

been serving them for ten years now, with their next lot of honey.

-Hi, Toby.

-Hey, Nick, how are you?

-Good, thanks.

-Here's the honey, 30 jars.

-Excellent.

How long's that going to keep you going for?

I reckon about a week.

-I'll be back in a week, thank you.

-Cheers then, cheers. Bye now.

This is a great local product.

Our customers understand the quality, they understand

the seasonality of this product and they're willing to pay for that.

Full of the flavours of London's very own back garden,

Toby's honey has a loyal local customer base.

It is a very special flavour.

It's quite different from the stuff that comes out of jars and has

these extra sort of tones and notes, which sort of set it apart.

The key to bringing great artisan food to London

is to have a passion for it.

It's a fight, it's difficult to do.

And without the passion, it won't happen.

It's great fun producing lots of different veg

from your own garden.

And in the last few years,

I've also been lucky enough to be able to harvest fruit.

My gran used to make the most amazing trifle.

And when I've got my own home-grown raspberries,

I love to rustle up my own twist on her old recipe.

It's my raspberry and pistachio trifle.

Now one of my favourite things from the veg patch are raspberries.

And I'm quite fortunate -

the raspberry plants I've got in my garden are Scottish raspberry

plants. And I say that because these are a beautiful little fruit,

that when they're in season, are some of the best you can get.

And I'm going to create a wonderful little trifle with this,

with a pistachio sponge.

But the way that I'm going to make it, is visit not Scotland

but France, because I'm going to do a genoise,

which is a mixture of sort of a standard cake recipe

but with the addition of butter.

The butter needs to be melted first,

so put in 25 grams in a saucepan over a low heat.

Now, what this will do to the sponge is prolong the shelf life

of the sponge. It adds moisture to it, stops it from drying out,

basically.

While the butter's melting,

whisk six eggs with 175 grams of caster sugar.

Now, really, you've just got to wait for the eggs and the sugar to whisk

up because, as they're doing it, you're creating air in there, lift,

and that's going to cause our sponge to be nice and light.

There's no baking powder, no bicarbonate here.

Now, you can really tell when the mixture's nearly ready because

it goes from yellow to white as it starts to get lighter and lighter.

But keep going, persevere with it.

That's why it's much easier using one of these things.

When the mixture is pale and thick, add 25 grams of pistachio paste,

which you can buy from specialist food retailers online.

And it's a sweetened paste.

Just a puree of pistachio nuts and water.

But it creates a wonderful colour

and taste to our sponge.

And I can always tell when a pistachio cake is done properly.

It's not vivid green, glow-in-the-dark green,

it's just a nice, light green colour.

Once the pistachio paste is mixed in,

add 175 grams of plain flour and the melted butter.

Now at this stage, roll your sleeves up.

And then using your hands,

and with your fingers open,

you carefully fold it through.

It's much quicker, much easier

and won't knock out the air that you've just placed in it as well.

Now this is particularly good

when you're making this style of sponge, with the addition of butter.

Cos the minute you add the butter to the mixture,

it actually causes it to collapse.

Pour the sponge mix into a cake tin that has been buttered and floured.

Get it into the oven as quick as you can, even if your hands

are covered in the cake mix.

Using my other hand, stick it in the oven.

It's 400 degrees Fahrenheit, 200 degrees centigrade.

That wants about 20 to 25 minutes.

And that gives you the time you'll need to get on

with the rest of your trifle.

Rather than use jelly,

which my sadly departed grandmother used to do,

I'm going to use these raspberries to create a wonderful little sauce.

Put 300 grams of fresh raspberries into a blender with two

tablespoons of water and blitz it until it's formed a puree.

Now if you wanted a smooth sauce,

you'd pass this through a sieve, to get rid of the seeds.

Because I'm going to layer it all up with

the rest of the raspberries, it doesn't really matter.

The main thing is, we just want the flavour from the raspberries.

By blitzing them with no sugar whatsoever, this will be just right.

I've rustled up home-made custard for the trifle, and I just have

to top the whole thing off with loads of double cream.

I'm just going to sweeten the cream with a little bit of icing sugar.

The reason why I'm going to use icing sugar,

is that it doesn't have any grains in it.

So when it's whisked up with the cream,

you get the sweetness of the cream but without the grains mixed in.

Whip 500 mls of the cream with three tablespoons of icing sugar.

You always want this just ever so slightly softly whipped,

not too firm.

Then really, it's kind of like an assembly job.

Start by lining the bottom of a large serving bowl with

squares of the cooled sponge.

Then drizzle with kirsch before adding layers of raspberry

sauce, custard and fresh raspberries.

So every time you get to a layer of sponge,

think about what the sponge is going to do.

It's going to absorb in all that liquid,

so a bit of kirsch and a bit more of this sauce.

Now my granny's old recipe used to be sherry and jelly, of course.

Nothing wrong with that.

It did used to put you to sleep, though.

So I wouldn't annoy her in the garden with the cricket bat,

banging up against the kitchen window.

Top the whole thing off with a generous layer

of the sweetened cream.

Finally, I'm going to finish this off with the leftover

bits of fresh raspberries...

..sprinkled over the top,

and then a combination of pistachio nuts and almonds.

Trifle has always been a firm favourite in my family,

and I've loved it ever since I was a little boy.

By throwing in some fresh fruit from my own garden, I think

I may have even improved on my granny's tried and trusted recipe.

Mm, look at that!

Now, the great thing about this - it's such a sharing dish.

So just stick it in a room full of people...and enjoy it.

Here you go guys, a small trifle.

Oh, wow. That's amazing.

I don't know what you lot are having, but I'm all right.

There you go.

Mm, that's good.

Oh, wow.

-Mm, really good.

-That's all right, though, isn't it?

When you've got stuff like this growing at the bottom of the garden,

there's nothing better.

Any chef worth their salt will tell you that nothing is more

important than cooking with fresh produce.

And using ingredients that you've grown in your own veg patch

will make a huge impact in the kitchen.

Even if you plant just a few herbs in pots at your back door,

you'll discover that they'll bring

a delicious burst of freshness and flavour into your dishes.

You can find all the recipes from the series on...